Monday, November 19, 2018

". . . the future axis of conflict in the region will not be as Trump and PM Netanyahu had hoped. It will be focused not on Iran, but
will rotate towards a further round of conflict with the Muslim
Brotherhood and its patrons – Turkey and Qatar. Some Gulf states are
more frightened of Islamist Muslim Brotherhood dissidence within their
emirates than they are frightened of Iran, which has no history of
external state expansion. These anxieties are driving – and represent –
the new regional re-alignment.

And
these Gulf states, the UAE and Saudi, are fearful that Turkey – the old
Ottoman imperial political power, and seat of the Islamic Umma – might
just succeed in usurping Saudi Arabia’s Islamic credentials – as
diminishing Saudi’s position as being no more than an inept Custodian of
Mecca and Medina (the Turkish press is full of such claims). This would
strip the Gulf of much of its significance and value to Washington.

And whilst the Gulf has made its turn toward a quasi-secularism to please the West, Turkey has been quietly vacuuming up what there is of the Gulf’s discarded Islamic credibility in the form of a MB-style, ‘soft’ Islamism – and a very explicit neo-Ottoman revanchism, fueled by Turkey’s sense of being victim to a conspiracy led by Mohamed bin Zayed, the US and Israel.

Thus,
the axis of the coming conflict is more likely to be that between a
fearful Gulf, and an increasingly assertive Turkey, bidding for the
leadership of the Islamic sphere. As for Iran, it can contemplate these
events with sanguinity: Saudi being pressed to end its campaign against
Yemen -and end its siege of Qatar. And, additionally, this new regional
dynamic will only serve to push Turkey and Qatar closer to Iran.

None
of this can be countered as promising for Mr Trump. Turkey will ‘lead’
on embracing the Palestinian cause (with Iran and Qatar in the
rear), and MbS will lack the credibility or standing to lead any new
‘war’ against Iran after the disaster of Yemen, nor be able to coerce
the Palestinians into capitulation in the face of the ‘deal of the
century’. Even his near incapacitated father, as well as the al-Saud
family, understand Netanyahu’s strategy to bury the ‘idea’ of a
Palestinian state – and in any event, Bibi’s strategy is likely to be
overtaken by internal politics, as Israel struggles with the
implications of Lieberman’s resignation."

Long American interpretation of Iran and Soleimani, based, of course, on coarse falsehoods, but by a sophisticated analyst who is not stupid (note how much time the author spends on rationalizing some of the nonsense): "Qassem Soleimani and Iran’s Unique Regional Strategy" (Soufan). Although it may seem like the Americans haven't got a clue, useful information is available to them (particularly from non-neoconned professional sources, which still exist, even if deeply buried within the Pentagon). They can't act on it because . . .shekels.

"After Lebanon 2006, Syria 2011 And Iraq 2014, The “Arab NATO” And A Sunni-Shia War To Revive" (Magnier):

"All wars initiated or supported by the US establishment – from the occupation of Iraq in 2003, the second Israeli war on Lebanon in 2006, the regime-change in Syria in 2011 and the occupation of a third of Iraq in 2014 – have failed in their goal of stoking the fire of sectarian war between Sunni and Shia in the Middle East. The failure of this strategy has pushed the US establishment towards two new options: the first, of using media to reveal Saudi Arabia’s intention to harm the Iranian economy and assassinate its military commanders. The second is to promote and advertise for an “Arab (Sunni) NATO Army”. The goal is to keep the possibility of sectarian war alive.

The struggle for dominance between Saudi Arabia and Iran has been going on since the fall of the Shah and the victory of the Islamic Republic in 1979. Nevertheless, today’s level of direct confrontation in various parts of the Middle East (Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Bahrein and Yemen) is unprecedented. This is partly the result of US efforts to throw gasoline on the fire of hate and competition between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

It is against the interests of the US establishment to see the Iran-Saudi struggle wane because that would damage the US economy. Trump said clearly that he needs Arab money in exchange for the protection he is offering, otherwise “the Arab regimes won’t last for one week”. Accordingly, a state of non-war or non-competition between Tehran and Riyadh would significantly reduce the billions of dollars in US arms sales to Saudi."

There is nothing even slightly 'American' about this, it is pure Yinon. A massive war in the Middle Eat would permanently ruin the American economy, and, as has been made clear, the Saudi arms contracts are either illusory or not that important. Just as with the nonsense of 'wars for oil', 'wars for arms contracts' is the lie told to protect the real scoundrels. Manipulating the Sunni-Shiite divide, though, is real, and has been the keystone of Zionism for years.

"A Singularly Semitic Scandal" (Langdon) (a reverse #metoo, with bizarre vehement calls not to listen to the victim, and an amazing component of violent nepotism, what's not to like?):

". . . no-one
has taken account of an obvious and important fact: all four of the
most important figures in the scandal are drawn from a single tiny
ethnic minority. This is a singularly Semitic scandal, because Avital
Ronell, Nimrod Reitman, Judith Butler and Jacques Derrida are all Jews.
Indeed, Ronell and Reitman are both “of Israeli heritage.”

But
that is not the only reason that the scandal is singularly Semitic. The
unhinged behaviour of both Ronell and Reitman casts an unforgiving light
on Jewish psychology and on the strong Jewish tendency towards both
megalomania and malice.Bernd Hüppauf, a German academic who worked at
NYU and was ousted by Ronell after giving her a job there, offers this
assessment of his nemesis in the left-wing journal Salon:

Before
I offered Avital Ronell her job, I’d had many in-depth conversations
with her. She engaged my queries with what seemed like understanding.
She said she’d throw herself into the building of an integrated study
and research program. She promised actively to contribute to department
research, conferences and publications. Once she had assumed the
position, however, she broke all her promises. She did her best to
sabotage the program. She pursued one goal: The work of Avital Ronell
and Jacques Derrida must be at the center of all teaching and research.
Instead of an academic program, we were left with boundless narcissism.
Once she’d become the head of the German department, she had her
secretary announce in a departmental meeting that in the German
department no student’s written work would any longer be acceptable
unless it cited Derrida and Ronell. …

The
quality of teaching in the department unraveled. The carefully planned
program of teaching German literature was ignored. Many students arrived
in the department with minimal knowledge of German literature or
history. The courses that were meant to correct this no longer existed.
Now philosophy, from Hegel to Judith Butler, was taught. But
multidisciplinarity quickly deteriorated into dilettantism. Students
were encouraged to take philosophy seminars at other universities. Soon,
students who had learned about deconstruction and feminism in Paris,
but who had no idea who Gottfried Benn, Joseph Roth and Alfred Döblin
were, were no exception in the department. As one student told me, “We
study in a German department where French theory is taught in English.” …

Included
in Professor Ronell’s instruments of domination was the absolute
control of information. Information streams were strictly controlled,
and a thick net was spun that captured and distributed them as she saw
fit. At a department meeting Professor Ronell let it be known through
her secretary that no member of the department would be allowed to make
contact with any dean at NYU without her (Professor Ronell’s) explicit
consent. Soon after that, there were no more department meetings.
Information was exchanged only in one-on-one conversations. Whoever did
not belong to the inner circle had no access to information. …

I
have saved a letter from a student who was close enough to Avital Ronell
to study her in detail. He was an older student who had completed
training as a psychotherapist. He had wanted to write his dissertation
under her guidance. After one year, he gave up, disillusioned, and left
the department. I quote from an E-mail he wrote to Professor Ronell:

From
my interactions with you and observing you in various settings, you
give the impression that you suffer from a well-known mental illness
referred to as malignant narcissism in a borderline structure … There
are clear clinical descriptions of sadistic object relations. You may
get some sense of why your criticisms of students are so often felt to
be destructive and disillusioning: you appear to be unable to control
your sadism.

Hüppauf
also notes that “squeezing me out wasn’t enough for Ronell. … At a
public event she labeled me an anti-Semite. Not that she actually
believed this smear. But the accusation, once uttered, was not easy to
unhear, and since it fit into her political calculations, she had no
scruples deploying it.” No scruples? Devious manipulation and
power-grabbing? Surely those are classic “anti-Semitic” accusations.
That they all seem to be perfectly true makes no difference in the
modern world. Typhlism [“the practice of turning a blind eye to essential but inconvenient facts”] rules, remember.

But
Ronell didn’t win all that power and control on her own. Just as she
promoted Derrida’s and Butler’s work and reputation, so her friends
promoted hers. In other words, the scandal also reveals the ethnic
nepotism that has allowed Jews to dominate and corrupt certain fields in
modern academia. I would say that Derrida, Butler, Ronell and Reitman
are all intellectual charlatans who owe their success to ethnic nepotism
and imposture. Judith Butler and Jacques Derrida, two giants of the
modern humanities, have contributed nothing to serious scholarship, but
enormous amounts to obscurantismand logorrhoea.
Derrida’s philosophy is obscurantism, but with a strong ingredient of
ethnic interests. As philosopher John Caputo puts it, “the idea behind
deconstruction is to deconstruct the workings of strong nation-states
with powerful immigration policies, to deconstruct the rhetoric of
nationalism, the politics of place, the metaphysics of native land and
native tongue” (here,
p. 200). In other words, it is a philosophy which is useful in
subverting the traditional peoples and cultures of the West, a common
theme in Jewish intellectual activism in the diaspora."

". . . the future axis of conflict in the region will not be as Trump and PM Netanyahu had hoped. It will be focused not on Iran, but
will rotate towards a further round of conflict with the Muslim
Brotherhood and its patrons – Turkey and Qatar. Some Gulf states are
more frightened of Islamist Muslim Brotherhood dissidence within their
emirates than they are frightened of Iran, which has no history of
external state expansion. These anxieties are driving – and represent –
the new regional re-alignment.

And
these Gulf states, the UAE and Saudi, are fearful that Turkey – the old
Ottoman imperial political power, and seat of the Islamic Umma – might
just succeed in usurping Saudi Arabia’s Islamic credentials – as
diminishing Saudi’s position as being no more than an inept Custodian of
Mecca and Medina (the Turkish press is full of such claims). This would
strip the Gulf of much of its significance and value to Washington.

And whilst the Gulf has made its turn toward a quasi-secularism to please the West, Turkey has been quietly vacuuming up what there is of the Gulf’s discarded Islamic credibility in the form of a MB-style, ‘soft’ Islamism – and a very explicit neo-Ottoman revanchism, fueled by Turkey’s sense of being victim to a conspiracy led by Mohamed bin Zayed, the US and Israel.

Thus,
the axis of the coming conflict is more likely to be that between a
fearful Gulf, and an increasingly assertive Turkey, bidding for the
leadership of the Islamic sphere. As for Iran, it can contemplate these
events with sanguinity: Saudi being pressed to end its campaign against
Yemen -and end its siege of Qatar. And, additionally, this new regional
dynamic will only serve to push Turkey and Qatar closer to Iran.

None
of this can be countered as promising for Mr Trump. Turkey will ‘lead’
on embracing the Palestinian cause (with Iran and Qatar in the
rear), and MbS will lack the credibility or standing to lead any new
‘war’ against Iran after the disaster of Yemen, nor be able to coerce
the Palestinians into capitulation in the face of the ‘deal of the
century’. Even his near incapacitated father, as well as the al-Saud
family, understand Netanyahu’s strategy to bury the ‘idea’ of a
Palestinian state – and in any event, Bibi’s strategy is likely to be
overtaken by internal politics, as Israel struggles with the
implications of Lieberman’s resignation."

Long American interpretation of Iran and Soleimani, based, of course, on coarse falsehoods, but by a sophisticated analyst who is not stupid (note how much time the author spends on rationalizing some of the nonsense): "Qassem Soleimani and Iran’s Unique Regional Strategy" (Soufan). Although it may seem like the Americans haven't got a clue, useful information is available to them (particularly from non-neoconned professional sources, which still exist, even if deeply buried within the Pentagon). They can't act on it because . . .shekels.

"After Lebanon 2006, Syria 2011 And Iraq 2014, The “Arab NATO” And A Sunni-Shia War To Revive" (Magnier):

"All wars initiated or supported by the US establishment – from the occupation of Iraq in 2003, the second Israeli war on Lebanon in 2006, the regime-change in Syria in 2011 and the occupation of a third of Iraq in 2014 – have failed in their goal of stoking the fire of sectarian war between Sunni and Shia in the Middle East. The failure of this strategy has pushed the US establishment towards two new options: the first, of using media to reveal Saudi Arabia’s intention to harm the Iranian economy and assassinate its military commanders. The second is to promote and advertise for an “Arab (Sunni) NATO Army”. The goal is to keep the possibility of sectarian war alive.

The struggle for dominance between Saudi Arabia and Iran has been going on since the fall of the Shah and the victory of the Islamic Republic in 1979. Nevertheless, today’s level of direct confrontation in various parts of the Middle East (Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Bahrein and Yemen) is unprecedented. This is partly the result of US efforts to throw gasoline on the fire of hate and competition between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

It is against the interests of the US establishment to see the Iran-Saudi struggle wane because that would damage the US economy. Trump said clearly that he needs Arab money in exchange for the protection he is offering, otherwise “the Arab regimes won’t last for one week”. Accordingly, a state of non-war or non-competition between Tehran and Riyadh would significantly reduce the billions of dollars in US arms sales to Saudi."

There is nothing even slightly 'American' about this, it is pure Yinon. A massive war in the Middle Eat would permanently ruin the American economy, and, as has been made clear, the Saudi arms contracts are either illusory or not that important. Just as with the nonsense of 'wars for oil', 'wars for arms contracts' is the lie told to protect the real scoundrels. Manipulating the Sunni-Shiite divide, though, is real, and has been the keystone of Zionism for years.

"A Singularly Semitic Scandal" (Langdon) (a reverse #metoo, with bizarre vehement calls not to listen to the victim, and an amazing component of violent nepotism, what's not to like?):

". . . no-one
has taken account of an obvious and important fact: all four of the
most important figures in the scandal are drawn from a single tiny
ethnic minority. This is a singularly Semitic scandal, because Avital
Ronell, Nimrod Reitman, Judith Butler and Jacques Derrida are all Jews.
Indeed, Ronell and Reitman are both “of Israeli heritage.”

But
that is not the only reason that the scandal is singularly Semitic. The
unhinged behaviour of both Ronell and Reitman casts an unforgiving light
on Jewish psychology and on the strong Jewish tendency towards both
megalomania and malice.Bernd Hüppauf, a German academic who worked at
NYU and was ousted by Ronell after giving her a job there, offers this
assessment of his nemesis in the left-wing journal Salon:

Before
I offered Avital Ronell her job, I’d had many in-depth conversations
with her. She engaged my queries with what seemed like understanding.
She said she’d throw herself into the building of an integrated study
and research program. She promised actively to contribute to department
research, conferences and publications. Once she had assumed the
position, however, she broke all her promises. She did her best to
sabotage the program. She pursued one goal: The work of Avital Ronell
and Jacques Derrida must be at the center of all teaching and research.
Instead of an academic program, we were left with boundless narcissism.
Once she’d become the head of the German department, she had her
secretary announce in a departmental meeting that in the German
department no student’s written work would any longer be acceptable
unless it cited Derrida and Ronell. …

The
quality of teaching in the department unraveled. The carefully planned
program of teaching German literature was ignored. Many students arrived
in the department with minimal knowledge of German literature or
history. The courses that were meant to correct this no longer existed.
Now philosophy, from Hegel to Judith Butler, was taught. But
multidisciplinarity quickly deteriorated into dilettantism. Students
were encouraged to take philosophy seminars at other universities. Soon,
students who had learned about deconstruction and feminism in Paris,
but who had no idea who Gottfried Benn, Joseph Roth and Alfred Döblin
were, were no exception in the department. As one student told me, “We
study in a German department where French theory is taught in English.” …

Included
in Professor Ronell’s instruments of domination was the absolute
control of information. Information streams were strictly controlled,
and a thick net was spun that captured and distributed them as she saw
fit. At a department meeting Professor Ronell let it be known through
her secretary that no member of the department would be allowed to make
contact with any dean at NYU without her (Professor Ronell’s) explicit
consent. Soon after that, there were no more department meetings.
Information was exchanged only in one-on-one conversations. Whoever did
not belong to the inner circle had no access to information. …

I
have saved a letter from a student who was close enough to Avital Ronell
to study her in detail. He was an older student who had completed
training as a psychotherapist. He had wanted to write his dissertation
under her guidance. After one year, he gave up, disillusioned, and left
the department. I quote from an E-mail he wrote to Professor Ronell:

From
my interactions with you and observing you in various settings, you
give the impression that you suffer from a well-known mental illness
referred to as malignant narcissism in a borderline structure … There
are clear clinical descriptions of sadistic object relations. You may
get some sense of why your criticisms of students are so often felt to
be destructive and disillusioning: you appear to be unable to control
your sadism.

Hüppauf
also notes that “squeezing me out wasn’t enough for Ronell. … At a
public event she labeled me an anti-Semite. Not that she actually
believed this smear. But the accusation, once uttered, was not easy to
unhear, and since it fit into her political calculations, she had no
scruples deploying it.” No scruples? Devious manipulation and
power-grabbing? Surely those are classic “anti-Semitic” accusations.
That they all seem to be perfectly true makes no difference in the
modern world. Typhlism [“the practice of turning a blind eye to essential but inconvenient facts”] rules, remember.

But
Ronell didn’t win all that power and control on her own. Just as she
promoted Derrida’s and Butler’s work and reputation, so her friends
promoted hers. In other words, the scandal also reveals the ethnic
nepotism that has allowed Jews to dominate and corrupt certain fields in
modern academia. I would say that Derrida, Butler, Ronell and Reitman
are all intellectual charlatans who owe their success to ethnic nepotism
and imposture. Judith Butler and Jacques Derrida, two giants of the
modern humanities, have contributed nothing to serious scholarship, but
enormous amounts to obscurantismand logorrhoea.
Derrida’s philosophy is obscurantism, but with a strong ingredient of
ethnic interests. As philosopher John Caputo puts it, “the idea behind
deconstruction is to deconstruct the workings of strong nation-states
with powerful immigration policies, to deconstruct the rhetoric of
nationalism, the politics of place, the metaphysics of native land and
native tongue” (here,
p. 200). In other words, it is a philosophy which is useful in
subverting the traditional peoples and cultures of the West, a common
theme in Jewish intellectual activism in the diaspora."